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As Canadians streamed back to work and school after the Labour Day weekend in 1986, Edgar Latulip, a developmentally delayed 21-year-old who functioned at the level of a child and had previously attempted suicide, walked away from a group home in Kitchener, Ont.

For almost 30 years, to the grief of his mother and bafflement of police, he was never heard from again.

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Until, astonishingly, a man living just a 90-minute drive away under a different identity in St. Catharines, told his social worker last month that he thought his real name might be Edgar Latulip.

“I’ve been a police officer for 18 years and this is something I’ve seen on TV but never been a part of,” Niagara Regional Police Const. Philip Gavin told the Star on Monday. “Absolutely, this is quite a rare one.”

Gavin provided the back story: In 1986, Latulip got on a bus to Niagara Falls, then made his way to nearby St. Catharines.

“He didn’t have a home at the time,” Gavin said. “And in and around that time he suffered a fall that resulted in a head injury. That head injury left him lacking memory and his identity.”

Latulip apparently lived for the next 30 years under an assumed name in St. Catharines.

When he disappeared, he had carried no luggage. Police in Waterloo Region suspected he might have travelled to Niagara Falls with another suicide bid in mind.

Latulip’s mother Silvia Wilson, who later moved to Ottawa, feared her son might have been murdered.

“This is always at the back of my mind,” she told the Waterloo Region Record for a 2014 story on missing persons.

“When Edgar disappeared, I became quite sick. I had to take a leave of absence from work. I was near a nervous breakdown.”

It was only in January, Const. Gavin explained, that the mystery began to be solved.

Latulip had reason to be in contact with a social worker. He told her he thought his real name was Edgar Latulip. She checked on-line and found the missing persons case under that name on the Waterloo police website.

Local police were contacted and interviewed Latulip, Gavin said. And “he was able to talk about more pieces” of memory that had recently come back to him.

He provided a DNA sample that was compared against that of a family member on file in Waterloo. And “that was the final piece of confirmation as to his identity,” Gavin said.

For now, Edgar Latulip is still “trying to grasp that after 30 years you realize you’re somebody else,” said Gavin. A reunion with his family was being arranged.

Alana Holtom, speaking for Waterloo Regional Police, said she spoke to Latulip’s mother on Wednesday after a detective had given her the news.

“They are planning to reunite,” she said. “You kind of want to see this storybook reuniting thing, but I think they are going to be handling it privately.

“I’m sure she’s very overwhelmed. She expressed her worry over all this time. So for it to come to this conclusion is remarkable.”

For investigators, it was a case that began before the technological revolution and — combined with the fact that Latulip seems to have lived a low-profile life off the social-media radar — made it more difficult to solve than recent disappearances.

With modern technology and social media, “your public fingerprint is all over the place,” Gavin said. It’s “a lot harder thing” for anyone to disappear today as completely as Latulip did.

Holtom agreed, saying that “nowadays as soon as we have a missing person we tweet the photo and any information we have out instantly.”

But “we did not give up,” she said. “We actually had him posted on our website as a missing person up until (Wednesday).”

That’s when Holtom got the call from homicide, which handles missing person cases, to update the site because someone had been located.

“When they tell me, I go, ‘Oh, my goodness’!”

And, all these years on, she was hardly alone.

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